Parts of this planet we live on don't even have access to a broadband Internet connection, and now they want to plug Mars on the network? Talk about priorities...
Have you considered the reason why some countries are fantastically wealthy, safe, and comfortable, while their next-door neighbors wallow in hungry squalor? Never mind the flukes -- can you see an overall pattern?
Hint: it's all about the social pattern established there. Some patterns create better incentives than others. By now, only a fool or a liar can fail to see the benefit of market-driven economies (even allowing for their frequent ugly hiccups).
NASA, as a facility for transferring federal money to specific congressional districts, is committed to the wrong sort of social pattern. After all, its very survival requires it to support any pork-barrel scheme that benefits it... or at least, to remain mute on a subject that no one should remain mute on. And so NASA cannot seriously advocate for free-market social patterns, as would be needed to bring broadband to the masses you quietly scream your love for.
In fact it was only last year that NASA offically reversed its policy of criticizing private space ventures. The times, they're a changin' for the better.
No respectable web site should use ActiveX. Period.
Unless you live in south korea. They use ActiveX on almost every webpage!
So now you understand why MS didn't drop ActiveX, and therefore why all the talk about improved security is marketing claptrap.
When you've got an entire country locked-in to your product, and countless smaller organizations too, you don't throw away the padlock during the upgrade.
Interesting. I went to swissair111.org and read up on the incident. They are now reporting that "MICHAIL ITKIS, CEO OF INTERACTIVE FLIGHT TECHNOLOGY CHANGES NAME TO MIKE SNOW". So apparently we need an extra step in the old cliche:
Create fly-by-night company to produce in-flight entertainment systems.
Rush the product to market prematurely.
Organize an IPO.
Profit !!
Observe the product causing airplanes to crash and burn.
Note to self: Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
Laugh while you can. Before long, turning off your Life Recorder will be considered a presumption of guilt.
The use of Life Recorders is only dangerous insofar as our society's ideology is broken. Whereas right now, there are so many loopholes, we can afford to believe stupid things ("it shall be illegal for an adult male to have penetrative sex with another adult male...") because there is so much room to hide from the law. Indeed, the deepest benefit of privacy is that it shields the lives of individuals from the ideologies of their neighbors.
By way of illustration, we all share (i.e. de-privatize) ourselves with people to the extent that they share our own ideology.
As others have already commented, movies are art. Art is the selective recreation of reality -- so it darn well ought to take advantage of new technologies that allow the director to achieve his or her exact aims. The world already has enough reality -- enough mistakes and errors and malevolence and pimples -- as it is.
Nevertheless, this line from the summary is notable:
The article mentions the moral qualms digital effects people have over performing these manipulations, and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets.
Har.
Those who have actual moral qualms, will refrain.
Those who think they ought to have moral qualms, will talk about having moral qualms but do it anyway.
America has always distanced herself from international communities, standards, and practices.
A mixed blessing, that.
The twentieth century was packed full of ugly trends and toxic ideologies, all of which got muted and diluted upon trying to emigrate to the states.
When ideas are fresh and new, it is hard to judge their long-term good or evil. Think of America as a late late adopter of social trends.
For example, South Korea was first to the punch in adopting web business, and as a result the entire country got horribly locked in to Microsoft due to ActiveX.
Don't play the human rights card because every nation has abuses [...]
It is so obviously wrong to compare one country's exceptional behavior to another's systematic behavior, that you must be either a liar or a fool.
Indeed, look at the very public arguments that Americans are having over the abuses you cited. Do you suppose there are similar arguments conducted in Chinese newspapers over the Tianenmen Square incident?
These days when you are as large as microsoft is, it doesnt really matter if you break the law.
If you do, and actually get caught, you get some token fine and you chalk it up as a cost of doing business and move on.
Sad but true. And I think I finally know why it happens...
Microsoft is so large, so widespread, and so universally relied upon, that it is very hard to punish Microsoft the corporation without also significantly hurting the rest of the country. For example, if we force them to reveal their source-code, then DoD computers (including Navy ships!) will be compromised... and so when a judge is on the verge of ordering the publication of source-code, a letter arrives via Fedex from the Pentagon (or whoever), and the judge proceeds to mumble something about the Public Interest*.
It's like finding out that your city's Water Department is up to no-good. What are you going to do, shut it down? It's hard to even issue it a fine, because that'll just make your water bill go up.
I italicized "Microsoft the corporation" because it is still quite feasible to punish individual Microsoft employees... except, of course, for the (IMHO) justified precedence of the corporate veil. Judges shy away from piercing it because (among other reasons) it is understood that corporations are patterns and it is easy to get caught in one and get incented or compelled to do something you otherwise wouldn't. And thus only the pattern itself (i.e. only the corporation itself) should be punished or executed (dispersed).
*Hint: whenever anybody says the phrase "the Public Interest" to you, it means that your energy is about to be fed to someone else.
Aren't we all judging the state of the patent system by reference to its treatment in the press?
Here on slashdot, the anti-establishment anti-government anti-Capitalism anti-big-anything memes are perilously strong. And so we aren't going to hear much about the other half of the story -- namely, the ways in which the patent system does in fact enable investment and innovation.
I personally have no clue whether the patent system is broken, or whether it is simply coughing and sputtering a bit under the deluge of so many brand new areas of research. Maybe the latter is why Congress should indeed pass some new rules.
GEORGE: Severance package...The Yankees are giving me three months full pay for doing nothing.
JERRY: They did it for three years. What's another few months.
GEORGE: I'm really going to do something with these three months.
JERRY: Like what?
GEORGE: I'm gonna read a book. From beginning to end. In that order.
JERRY: I've always wanted to do that...
GEORGE: I'm gonna play frolf.
JERRY: You mean golf?
GEORGE: Frolf, frisbee golf Jerry. Golf with a frisbee. This is gonna be my time. Time to taste the fruits and let the juices drip down my chin. I proclaim this: The Summer of George!
Is your humor an attempt to minimalize a fair, and IMO accurate, opinion of the state of US society and politics?
I agree that SUVs are rarely the optimal choice of vehicle. And our suspicion that SUVs are usually chosen for 'image', has been confirmed to me by two different car salesmen I know. And I am perfectly aware of the lamentable effect SUVs have on the petroleum industry. Only a fool could think otherwise on any of these points.
I said what I did to the original poster because even though all three of us agree on these points, it still seemed obvious that his core motivation was envy.
And what type of vehicle do you choose to "afford" sir?
I drive a Lexus sedan.
But before you mock me, you should know that a) I bought it because it's amazingly quiet and comfortable during my very long commute, b) it's paid off with money I earned, and c) this is my eighth year of ownership and I'm nearing 200,000 miles. My next car will be a Subaru Forester.
Also I'm a woman, but apparently I'm so geeky and cynical that everyone here assumes I'm a 'sir'.:)
Implying that people arguing against SUVs are simply jealous poor people and/or that something is okay just because you can afford it is ridiculous.
I didn't imply that... his post absolutely reeked of it. I was just pointing out that his SUVs-are-environmentally-harmful point was the end of the psychological progression for him, rather than (as he would have us believe) the starting point of his condemnation of those who drive them.
1. Deliver a thoughtful and witty reply in a slashdot thread.
2. Illustrate the reply with Yet Another Car Analogy.
3. Bend the car analogy into an angry, frothing rant against SUVs... or rather, against the people who drive them... or rather, against the people who can afford them.
4. ???
5. Hard-on! I mean, profit!
Blaming the medium or the tools is just plain stupid. This was, of course, a correct decision
Agreed... but, read closer:
The judge ruled, 'To impose a duty under these circumstances for MySpace to confirm or determine the age of each applicant, with liability resulting from negligence in performing or not performing duty, would of course stop MySpace's business in its tracks and close this avenue of communication.'"
The problem is that the judge did not say "The plaintiffs are teh asshats for even bringing this to trial at all, because MySpace clearly makes no promises about the validity of its user profiles." No, he didn't say that, because that would set a major precedent in favor of personal responsibility which would crash headlong into the current "seller beware" fad of tort rulings.
No, he simply said "We can't hold them liable because they would go out of business if we did." That wording is a timebomb -- how long until somebody says "Why should any business be allowed to profit from blah blah blah won't somebody think of the children?!" Or: "Why don't we force MySpace to charge for service and (therein) verify its users' ages?"
Stupid judge. Is it really too much to ask, to have someone stand up and say "It's a wilderness out there -- if you don't like it, stay indoors, and for chrissake don't expect somebody to watch your children for you!"
What you see as a problem, I see as a business opportunity: Everyone needs a SnowTech-1000 personal EMP! Protect your loved ones by protecting your anonymity, from corrupt governments, angry neighbors, and evil computer AIs.
Good idea. It would make a great companion to the Bollix jammer I just mounted on my car. Now I'm saving up for platcats and a cyberlink (+3 to hit!)...
Rote says yes, and that 'Second Life users are a unique audience, in that, they are first adopters. It is a smaller community, but I would argue it is a more influential community.'"
Whenever anyone says "I would argue...", note that they have not actually said "I am now arguing...".
In fact the phrase "I would argue" serves the same purpose as 'really', 'great', and 'literally': it is a flag to warn us that the speaker doesn't fully believe what he or she is saying.
Eventually, the biologically derived suits might even be able to heal themselves.
Can we stop with the manned probes already? Earth is the only place in the solar system that is either safe or comfortable for humans. Even Mars, the next runner-up, is a century of terraforming away from habitability -- and even then it will still be too cold, and too damn far away.
The future of space exploration is AI robotics.
Actually that's the future of Earth too. To my eye, nature's purpose in evolving us is to create the first generation of fully rational creatures. They'll be the first living things to be born without all the jungle baggage -- tribalism and religion foremost among them. And I'll bet they'll be born out of the space program.
No, the SE didn't benefit (or at least not primarily). Rather, the workers they paid to game it, benefited. Thus it can't be a DWL by the definition -- the loss of some corresponded to the gain of those workers. It doesn't matter that there was a net loss after summing over all agents; that's not what DWL refers to. Hence my confusion with the concept.
Total social wealth is decreased when people employ others to perform useless tasks, such as battling over a search-engine slot. The SEO industry, like the realm of marketing in which it resides, is one millimeter above being a zero-sum game. And yet the people involved all consume a great deal of wealth in going through their contortions. That makes it a DWL... although that may or may not be how the term got used in the original post.
This issue has long bugged me and it's hard to get answers about it. I don't understand how this is a deadweight loss (DWL) by his definition. Who got the $5000 worth of effort from each of them that they spent? That was the corresponding benefit to another party. How is this DWL different from the "non-DWL" example directly preceding, in which someone overpaid for hosting, but that was the hosting company's gain?
The search-engine received all the benefits of the efforts, but those benefits cancelled each other out.
And even if they didn't cancel, the 'benefit' is not useful to the search-engine, because it only amounted to a minor change in search-results ranking. The market itself (i.e. the users who are searching) would benefit by that change in ranking... but only if the change caused an objectively better company to win a higher slot.
In the case of (your example) weddings consults, there are probably no significant differences in product quality among the major players. Therefore, there is no benefit to the world if Wedding Consultants #228 takes a larger share of the market than Wedding Consultants #854. Thus we arrive at the general and distrubing conclusion that marketing efforts consume a lot of wealth but often (usually?) create no net wealth in return. A marketing effort usually just steers consumers in a slightly different but meaninglessly equivalent direction.
I'd hate myself if I worked in marketing. Of course it's a different story if the product you're pushing is one of the rare objectively superior products... but those don't seem to come up very often nowadays.
"Ubuntu's next release, Feisty Fawn, is due out in April [...]
I just want to know... if the next version will be called "Gay Giraffe"
Yeah, I was thinking something similar. It makes one wonder if the Ubuntu guys want to fail in the market. Here's a tip, guys: don't let the geeks choose the product names or even the code names.
But saying that anti-virus programs will ignore the "harmless" malware overlooks the fact that there is no harmless malware. There doesn't exist any malware that's going to go to the trouble of infecting your machine and propogating, and then not do anything. No one would program one. That means that all malware is either black hat (adware, botnet, spyware, etc.) or white hat (attacks other malware). Even if it's not using CPU resources, it is doing some other damage, such as annoying the user or enabling spam (in the case of black hat) or violating the freedom of a user to choose what software they have installed on their machine (in the case of white hat). Either way, all malware should be cleaned by anti-malware programs. In the world of software programmed by people, there's no such thing as harmless piggybacking.
That will very suddenly change once there is a business model in place for distributed computing. At that time, it will be profitable to run a botnet to crunch computational problems for profit. The malware could be used to quietly steal 10% of the CPU power of a million idle (i.e. consumer) workstations.
Or it may steal a small fraction of the user's usually-underutilized network connection, perhaps to crawl the web.
In both senses, the piggybacking is not meaningfully harmful. And because antivirus efforts cost money, effort, CPU cycles, diskspace, and frustration, it would be rational to forego it all in favor of a well-behaved strain of malware. The malware would simply be allowed (consciously or otherwise) to reside in your computer... as long as it doesn't take too much and is good at fending off the other malware.
Slashdot Mirror
You are confusing NASA's de jure function with its de facto function.
Have you considered the reason why some countries are fantastically wealthy, safe, and comfortable, while their next-door neighbors wallow in hungry squalor? Never mind the flukes -- can you see an overall pattern?
Hint: it's all about the social pattern established there. Some patterns create better incentives than others. By now, only a fool or a liar can fail to see the benefit of market-driven economies (even allowing for their frequent ugly hiccups).
NASA, as a facility for transferring federal money to specific congressional districts, is committed to the wrong sort of social pattern. After all, its very survival requires it to support any pork-barrel scheme that benefits it... or at least, to remain mute on a subject that no one should remain mute on. And so NASA cannot seriously advocate for free-market social patterns, as would be needed to bring broadband to the masses you quietly scream your love for.
In fact it was only last year that NASA offically reversed its policy of criticizing private space ventures. The times, they're a changin' for the better.
By 'right' do you mean "provided free of charge, if necessary"? If so, by what method are victims selected to fund the exercise of this right?
So now you understand why MS didn't drop ActiveX, and therefore why all the talk about improved security is marketing claptrap.
When you've got an entire country locked-in to your product, and countless smaller organizations too, you don't throw away the padlock during the upgrade.
Interesting. I went to swissair111.org and read up on the incident. They are now reporting that "MICHAIL ITKIS, CEO OF INTERACTIVE FLIGHT TECHNOLOGY CHANGES NAME TO MIKE SNOW". So apparently we need an extra step in the old cliche:
MTBF, in this case, means Mean Time Between Farkings. So yeah, three seconds is an astoundingly short refractive period. :)
Laugh while you can. Before long, turning off your Life Recorder will be considered a presumption of guilt.
The use of Life Recorders is only dangerous insofar as our society's ideology is broken. Whereas right now, there are so many loopholes, we can afford to believe stupid things ("it shall be illegal for an adult male to have penetrative sex with another adult male...") because there is so much room to hide from the law. Indeed, the deepest benefit of privacy is that it shields the lives of individuals from the ideologies of their neighbors.
By way of illustration, we all share (i.e. de-privatize) ourselves with people to the extent that they share our own ideology.
As others have already commented, movies are art. Art is the selective recreation of reality -- so it darn well ought to take advantage of new technologies that allow the director to achieve his or her exact aims. The world already has enough reality -- enough mistakes and errors and malevolence and pimples -- as it is.
Nevertheless, this line from the summary is notable:
Har.
Those who have actual moral qualms, will refrain.
Those who think they ought to have moral qualms, will talk about having moral qualms but do it anyway.
A mixed blessing, that.
The twentieth century was packed full of ugly trends and toxic ideologies, all of which got muted and diluted upon trying to emigrate to the states.
When ideas are fresh and new, it is hard to judge their long-term good or evil. Think of America as a late late adopter of social trends.
For example, South Korea was first to the punch in adopting web business, and as a result the entire country got horribly locked in to Microsoft due to ActiveX.
It is so obviously wrong to compare one country's exceptional behavior to another's systematic behavior, that you must be either a liar or a fool.
Indeed, look at the very public arguments that Americans are having over the abuses you cited. Do you suppose there are similar arguments conducted in Chinese newspapers over the Tianenmen Square incident?
Sad but true. And I think I finally know why it happens...
Microsoft is so large, so widespread, and so universally relied upon, that it is very hard to punish Microsoft the corporation without also significantly hurting the rest of the country. For example, if we force them to reveal their source-code, then DoD computers (including Navy ships!) will be compromised... and so when a judge is on the verge of ordering the publication of source-code, a letter arrives via Fedex from the Pentagon (or whoever), and the judge proceeds to mumble something about the Public Interest*.
It's like finding out that your city's Water Department is up to no-good. What are you going to do, shut it down? It's hard to even issue it a fine, because that'll just make your water bill go up.
I italicized "Microsoft the corporation" because it is still quite feasible to punish individual Microsoft employees... except, of course, for the (IMHO) justified precedence of the corporate veil. Judges shy away from piercing it because (among other reasons) it is understood that corporations are patterns and it is easy to get caught in one and get incented or compelled to do something you otherwise wouldn't. And thus only the pattern itself (i.e. only the corporation itself) should be punished or executed (dispersed).
*Hint: whenever anybody says the phrase "the Public Interest" to you, it means that your energy is about to be fed to someone else.
Aren't we all judging the state of the patent system by reference to its treatment in the press?
Here on slashdot, the anti-establishment anti-government anti-Capitalism anti-big-anything memes are perilously strong. And so we aren't going to hear much about the other half of the story -- namely, the ways in which the patent system does in fact enable investment and innovation.
I personally have no clue whether the patent system is broken, or whether it is simply coughing and sputtering a bit under the deluge of so many brand new areas of research. Maybe the latter is why Congress should indeed pass some new rules.
No. he is saying that he is the retarded offspring of five monkeys that had regular sex with a retarded fish-squirrel.
Apparently, our next task in Kansas is to amend the sex education textbooks.
GEORGE: Severance package...The Yankees are giving me three months full pay for doing nothing.
JERRY: They did it for three years. What's another few months.
GEORGE: I'm really going to do something with these three months.
JERRY: Like what?
GEORGE: I'm gonna read a book. From beginning to end. In that order.
JERRY: I've always wanted to do that...
GEORGE: I'm gonna play frolf.
JERRY: You mean golf?
GEORGE: Frolf, frisbee golf Jerry. Golf with a frisbee. This is gonna be my time. Time to taste the fruits and let the juices drip down my chin. I proclaim this: The Summer of George!
I agree that SUVs are rarely the optimal choice of vehicle. And our suspicion that SUVs are usually chosen for 'image', has been confirmed to me by two different car salesmen I know. And I am perfectly aware of the lamentable effect SUVs have on the petroleum industry. Only a fool could think otherwise on any of these points.
I said what I did to the original poster because even though all three of us agree on these points, it still seemed obvious that his core motivation was envy.
I drive a Lexus sedan.
But before you mock me, you should know that a) I bought it because it's amazingly quiet and comfortable during my very long commute, b) it's paid off with money I earned, and c) this is my eighth year of ownership and I'm nearing 200,000 miles. My next car will be a Subaru Forester.
Also I'm a woman, but apparently I'm so geeky and cynical that everyone here assumes I'm a 'sir'. :)
I didn't imply that... his post absolutely reeked of it. I was just pointing out that his SUVs-are-environmentally-harmful point was the end of the psychological progression for him, rather than (as he would have us believe) the starting point of his condemnation of those who drive them.
1. Deliver a thoughtful and witty reply in a slashdot thread.
2. Illustrate the reply with Yet Another Car Analogy.
3. Bend the car analogy into an angry, frothing rant against SUVs... or rather, against the people who drive them... or rather, against the people who can afford them.
4. ???
5. Hard-on! I mean, profit!
Agreed... but, read closer:
The problem is that the judge did not say "The plaintiffs are teh asshats for even bringing this to trial at all, because MySpace clearly makes no promises about the validity of its user profiles." No, he didn't say that, because that would set a major precedent in favor of personal responsibility which would crash headlong into the current "seller beware" fad of tort rulings.
No, he simply said "We can't hold them liable because they would go out of business if we did." That wording is a timebomb -- how long until somebody says "Why should any business be allowed to profit from blah blah blah won't somebody think of the children?!" Or: "Why don't we force MySpace to charge for service and (therein) verify its users' ages?"
Stupid judge. Is it really too much to ask, to have someone stand up and say "It's a wilderness out there -- if you don't like it, stay indoors, and for chrissake don't expect somebody to watch your children for you!"
Good idea. It would make a great companion to the Bollix jammer I just mounted on my car. Now I'm saving up for platcats and a cyberlink (+3 to hit!)...
Indeed. Observe the Second Life guy's comment:
Whenever anyone says "I would argue...", note that they have not actually said "I am now arguing...".
In fact the phrase "I would argue" serves the same purpose as 'really', 'great', and 'literally': it is a flag to warn us that the speaker doesn't fully believe what he or she is saying.
Can we stop with the manned probes already? Earth is the only place in the solar system that is either safe or comfortable for humans. Even Mars, the next runner-up, is a century of terraforming away from habitability -- and even then it will still be too cold, and too damn far away.
The future of space exploration is AI robotics.
Actually that's the future of Earth too. To my eye, nature's purpose in evolving us is to create the first generation of fully rational creatures. They'll be the first living things to be born without all the jungle baggage -- tribalism and religion foremost among them. And I'll bet they'll be born out of the space program.
Total social wealth is decreased when people employ others to perform useless tasks, such as battling over a search-engine slot. The SEO industry, like the realm of marketing in which it resides, is one millimeter above being a zero-sum game. And yet the people involved all consume a great deal of wealth in going through their contortions. That makes it a DWL... although that may or may not be how the term got used in the original post.
Now I'm confused too.
The search-engine received all the benefits of the efforts, but those benefits cancelled each other out.
And even if they didn't cancel, the 'benefit' is not useful to the search-engine, because it only amounted to a minor change in search-results ranking. The market itself (i.e. the users who are searching) would benefit by that change in ranking... but only if the change caused an objectively better company to win a higher slot.
In the case of (your example) weddings consults, there are probably no significant differences in product quality among the major players. Therefore, there is no benefit to the world if Wedding Consultants #228 takes a larger share of the market than Wedding Consultants #854. Thus we arrive at the general and distrubing conclusion that marketing efforts consume a lot of wealth but often (usually?) create no net wealth in return. A marketing effort usually just steers consumers in a slightly different but meaninglessly equivalent direction.
I'd hate myself if I worked in marketing. Of course it's a different story if the product you're pushing is one of the rare objectively superior products... but those don't seem to come up very often nowadays.
Yeah, I was thinking something similar. It makes one wonder if the Ubuntu guys want to fail in the market. Here's a tip, guys: don't let the geeks choose the product names or even the code names.
That will very suddenly change once there is a business model in place for distributed computing. At that time, it will be profitable to run a botnet to crunch computational problems for profit. The malware could be used to quietly steal 10% of the CPU power of a million idle (i.e. consumer) workstations.
Or it may steal a small fraction of the user's usually-underutilized network connection, perhaps to crawl the web.
In both senses, the piggybacking is not meaningfully harmful. And because antivirus efforts cost money, effort, CPU cycles, diskspace, and frustration, it would be rational to forego it all in favor of a well-behaved strain of malware. The malware would simply be allowed (consciously or otherwise) to reside in your computer... as long as it doesn't take too much and is good at fending off the other malware.